What do you mean by “game-based anime adaptation”? Like an anime that takes place in a fictional video game? An anime based on a real game?
For the former, Shangri-La Frontier has been mentioned but needs to be mentioned again. It’s super good and enjoyable and I like that the game actually feels like it could be a real game. Unlike stuff like BOFURI — which is still an enjoyable anime — the game mechanics all made sense. You don’t have Maple stumbling onto unique quests that only she finds that give her absolutely broken OP abilities and the dev’s going “oh no, who could have seen Maple becoming OP by getting OP abilities?”
Log Horizon is another great twist, where people get isekai’d into a video game and then have to deal with the fact that the game is “real” and NPCs aren’t just mindless bits of code.
Guilty pleasure goes to Sword Art Online. No, it’s definitely not perfect, but it ticks a lot of boxes for a silly fun anime about death games.
For the latter, I can’t imagine there are too many options. You have Pokemon, Cyberpunk Edgerunners, NieR: Automata V1.1a (which is really just the video game’s story verbatim), Stein’s Gate, the entire Fate and .hack franchises, and probably a bunch of stuff I don’t remember. But you also have loads upon loads of absolute CRAP too.
I keep thinking there’s a secret third option because of the ambiguous way the question was phrased – something like how seemingly half of all isekai have gaming-inspired abilities despite not being set in nor based on a video game world.
Well, there is that but I was thinking more like the world of The Weakest Tamer where everyone has a magical “skill” dictated by how many “stars” they have and the MC has a voice in their head that tells them things they may not know (which goes unheard by the audience but seems to chime in like a player through a screen (or maybe just a ghost)), but otherwise has no obvious tells of being a video game world. Unless you count the MC doing inventory management on the regular.
What do you mean by “game-based anime adaptation”? Like an anime that takes place in a fictional video game? An anime based on a real game?
For the former, Shangri-La Frontier has been mentioned but needs to be mentioned again. It’s super good and enjoyable and I like that the game actually feels like it could be a real game. Unlike stuff like BOFURI — which is still an enjoyable anime — the game mechanics all made sense. You don’t have Maple stumbling onto unique quests that only she finds that give her absolutely broken OP abilities and the dev’s going “oh no, who could have seen Maple becoming OP by getting OP abilities?”
Log Horizon is another great twist, where people get isekai’d into a video game and then have to deal with the fact that the game is “real” and NPCs aren’t just mindless bits of code.
Guilty pleasure goes to Sword Art Online. No, it’s definitely not perfect, but it ticks a lot of boxes for a silly fun anime about death games.
For the latter, I can’t imagine there are too many options. You have Pokemon, Cyberpunk Edgerunners, NieR: Automata V1.1a (which is really just the video game’s story verbatim), Stein’s Gate, the entire Fate and .hack franchises, and probably a bunch of stuff I don’t remember. But you also have loads upon loads of absolute CRAP too.
I keep thinking there’s a secret third option because of the ambiguous way the question was phrased – something like how seemingly half of all isekai have gaming-inspired abilities despite not being set in nor based on a video game world.
Right? I remember initially thinking “video games based on anime? Like… that Attack on Titan game?”
Well, there is that but I was thinking more like the world of The Weakest Tamer where everyone has a magical “skill” dictated by how many “stars” they have and the MC has a voice in their head that tells them things they may not know (which goes unheard by the audience but seems to chime in like a player through a screen (or maybe just a ghost)), but otherwise has no obvious tells of being a video game world. Unless you count the MC doing inventory management on the regular.